@manton I know that Micro.blog can't (and shouldn't, really) be an all-in-one replacement for every silo, not least because of the inevitable bloat that would occur, but a nice simple option like this for books would be great. That way it would be even easier to avoid Goodreads, just like it is with avoiding Instagram thanks to the photo features of Micro.blog.

@simonwoods I'm excited about this idea. I've always known we should do more with books but for some reason it didn't occur to me to make a built-in Books page. I'd like to one day use this kind of thing to catalog our bookshelves, too.

@manton this would be a great use of Hugo’s data-posts features where you can have just a simple JSON doc process to a page. I don’t know of any services that do the ISBN -> image cover lookup. Maybe Amazon is the best way? It’d be cool.

@manton I recently added read posts for my blog following current microformats recommendations. I ended up using calibre's CLI tools for cover retrieval rather than rolling my own (supports both Amazon and Google). Might be a good place to look for ideas for how to implement this.

@jsonbecker It's too bad the Google API thing for books doesn't have a way to just pull a cover image via an img src URL constructed from the ISBN. I was looking at the Open Library thing at Internet Archive which does that but of course there's way too many books not in their database.

@bix Your post and @jsonbecker 's early post gave me an idea. It is possible to build a "passable" shortcode using data retrieval to query the Google books API from to get a cover from ISBN. However, out of the handful of ISBNs I tried - a number didn't exist or did not have a good sized image. :( The linked example is hardcoded to use thumbnails, and doesn't fall back very well if an ISBN isn't found, shindakun.micro.blog/2019/12/3...

@shindakun I’m on my phone so I can’t look close right now but I did notice earlier that in the googleapi thing for looking up ISBN’s the image URLs have a size parameter that can be changed to increase the size.

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